HOME

A freelance bass player and bass tutor for many years I earn my living from this and over the past 10 years I’ve added sound engineer to the mix of income activities. The past couple of years has seen massive expansion of the Hire business (Clive Sound).

Politically I only became active recently, starting with support for the organisation Positive Money, who advocate full monetary reform. This is to end or reduce the power of bankers who currently control how much money flows into the UK. They do this by issuing lines of credit (loans) and about 97% of money is created in this way. This means they effectively control the economy of the UK (actually this is pretty much universal around the world now).

It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be slaves to interest payments.

As this passion for monetary reform grew I noticed that of all the political parties only one, The Green Party, adopted monetary reform roughly along the lines of Positive Money’s arguments. I joined the party immediately they adopted this as official policy. Of course, I found that I agreed with much that the party had been fighting for and quite rapidly found myself being selected to stand for the Green Party in Rochester and Strood (Kent). What I didn’t realise when I took on this role was that within months I’d be fighting a by-election in the full glare of the nation – a by-election triggered by the defection of Tory MP Mark Reckless to UKIP.

I was never going to win but we doubled the number of votes and retained these votes in the 2015 general election despite the vast sums of money spent by the big parties.

The General Election nationally showed what a sham our so called democracy is with the Tories gaining 320 MPs for a mere 11 million votes, with UKIP only gaining 1 MP for 4 million and likewise the Green Party only gaining 1 MP for our 1.1 million votes. I believe in full electoral reform. For me nothing less than every vote counting towards seats in parliament would satisfy me – I also believe that millions will continue to stay away from the ballot box until this happens, believing with some justification that there is no point in voting. It’s certainly true that democracy is an illusion – so do we just allow this to continue or do we try and fight to win democracy.

So back to the bass playing; I’m working hard to take my album Jazza Jabba live – mix in a bit of political discussion – plenty of humour, with some great players in the band. It has to happen in 2016 – we’ll see. In the meantime you can take a listen and hopefully buy a track or two or even the whole album, below is the store: